If you are interested in localized (i.e. translated into other languages) live CD files, install also l10n-kickstarts.

Configuring the image

The configuration of the live image is defined by a file called kickstart. It can include some basic system configuration items, the package manifest and a script to be run at the end of the build process.

For the Fedora project, the most important live image configurations files are:

For Fedora 20 and earlier: fedora-livecd-desktop.ks : Complete desktop with applications and input/output support for all supported locales in Fedora (this one is part of the 'spin-kickstarts' package) - despite the name, this is the kickstart that generates the ~1GB-sized images for recent releases.

kickstart files for other spins (e.g. Fedora Electronics Lab) can be found in /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/ after installing the 'spin-kickstarts' package. These pre-made configuration files can be a great place to start, as they already have some useful pre and post-installation scripts.

system-config-kickstart

You can create a customized kickstart file by running system-config-kickstart. Note that you might have to install the package first with su -c "dnf install system-config-kickstart" in Fedora 22 and beyond or su -c "yum install system-config-kickstart" in earlier versions of Fedora. This tool is mainly intended for generating kickstart files for automated installs, not live images, so the output will probably not be usable without editing, but it may help you to generate particular kickstart directives. Remember to add the line:

%include /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/fedora-live-base.ks

at the beginning of your kickstart file to include the base live configuration.

Using your new live image

Installing the Live image to the hard drive As of Fedora 7, anaconda has support for doing an installation from a live image. To use this, double click on the Install to Hard Drive item on the desktop or run

/usr/bin/liveinst

if you don't have such an icon. However, because of the way livecd-creator works, it is not possible to choose a different set of packages or a different filesystem during installation.

Live Image Media Verification

The live image can incorporate functionality to verify itself. To do so, you need to have isomd5sum installed both on the system used for creating the image and installed into the image. This is so that the implantisomd5 and checkisomd5 utilities can be used. These utilities take advantage of embedding an md5sum into the application area of the iso9660 image. This then gets verified before mounting the real root filesystem.